Night vision working, day vision not

[joostdejonge]

Dear Zoneminder users,

I am new to Zoneminder, but it looks very impressive to keep using it.

The thing is, I am running into a strange problem.
I have a setup with Zoneminder 1.30.4, running on Debian 9 system. I'm using 6 Foscam FI9901EP camera's.

This is the behavior I have: with day light, some of the camera's are working, some of them are not (when checking the camera's in VLC, all are working). When it is getting dark outside, the camera's changes to night vision, and then everything is working... I really don't know what direction I should look at.

Other strange behavior: the button "log" brings up the system logging window, but no logging is shown (however in system log, I can see Zoneminder logging lines).

Load is around 1.5, /dev/shm on 51%

Any help is really appreciated!

Thanks,

Joost

[Avro125]

Are you pushing your system too hard? Without CPU, RAM, camera resolution and frame rate info it's difficult to tell, however load seems high if you've got a dual core CPU.

I could be wrong here, but maybe the extra workload of the colour streams is what's causing it to fail? Try manually forcing all of the cameras to 8-bit greyscale in the 'Source' tab on the monitor. You'll likely have to restart ZoneMinder after doing this (cling on 'Running' in the top line and select 'Restart') If this is done during the day and things start working properly in black and white, then it's time to consider lessening the workload on your system. Generally this means slowing down the frame rate, smaller motion areas, etc.

I tried switching from 24-bit to 8-bit on my ZM just now. Dropped memory usage from 32% to 11%, and CPU went from about 1.15 to .5 (dual core system). Colour storage and analysis takes up a LOT of RAM and CPU resources.

Not sure about the log button, but on my system - which isn't over taxed too much - it takes ZM a good 10 seconds to load the log entries. If your computer is at its limit, it may just be taking a looooong time to load.

[bbunge]

There should be no difference between Day and Night mode with your cameras. You will get an alarm when the cameras switch from day to night and back to day. This is unavoidable as the image changes.

Use ffmpeg with TCP in Zoneminder with the same string you use in VLC. You may want to set an unprivileged user in the camera to use Zoneminder.

Set the frame rate in the cameras to 5 FPS and the key frame interval to 10.

In Zoneminder use 32 bit colour and the lowest resolution you can live with to get it working.

Your /dev/shm is OK but change the PATH SWAP to /dev/shm

Do not know what instructions you used to install Zoneminder but you can check these out: https://wiki.zoneminder.com/Debian_9_64 ... e_Easy_Way

I must confess I've not been pleased with Zoneminder on Debian 9. I have much better success with Ubuntu and Centos (Ubuntu 16.04 preferred).

As an aside, one of my clients recently changed all the outside lighting to LED's which messed up the night vision in the outside cameras. The fix was to turn off the night vision as the new LED lights were bright enough to allow the Foscam cameras to see better than with IR!

[joostdejonge]

Thanks.

/dev/shm path is as you stated
I used instructions from the link to install in Debian, perhaps I will give Ubuntu a try.

I made the changes you suggested, changed to 5 fps, key frame interval to 10, resolution for the moment no change.

Let's wait and see what will happen.

Still strange with the log files, also after long waiting times, the log files don't show up.

[bbunge]

Run mysqltuner on the Mariadb to see if there are some settings to tweek. You may need to up the innodb_buffer_pool size as well as several other settings. Set max_connections to 500 or more.

[joostdejonge]

Thanks for all the tips!

I think it is the combination of the modifications, I have made the recommended changes to the mysql settings, reduced resolution, using color mode (not bw).

Let's wait if it is running stable now.

[joostdejonge]

All day stable! Thanks for all the help.

[joostdejonge]

nb, emptying the logs database in mysql solved the logging issue (database was over 285 mb in size, apparently too big...)